Great Ways to Discover Employee Strengths

What are the most important characteristics of your next star employee? I’d suggest there are three: trustworthiness, essential competency, and perhaps the most important characteristic, passion (for life, for people, for your work, for every breath).
With these characteristics in mind, check out the following tools to discover and analyze these strengths in employees, potential employee, and perhaps yourself!

Trustworthiness

It probably won’t take you long to determine if a current employee is trustworthy. But how can you improve your chances in the hiring process. Sarah Gabot in Remote Team Management provides a few tips on how you can hire employees that you can trust:

Take your time.

Check references.

Hire humble people.

Trust your gut.

Skills testing

The ambitiously named Competency Group will help you with mapping the compentencies and skills necessary for a position, and with testing of recruits and employees. They write:

Skill is often used interchangeably with competency. However, the identification of job skills is only the first level of a competency analysis. It is usually the first step in developing a competency map. A skills analysis is often represented as a two-dimensional chart. The chart identifies the major responsibilities of a job and breaks down each major responsibility into its job skills or tasks. A full competency analysis or competency map also describes the sub-skills, supporting knowledge and abilities, attitudes and behaviors, and tools required to perform the job. It may also identify the performance standard to carry out each skill

Passion

Building a culture of employees who truly love their work begins during the hiring process. In News Business Weekly, William Powley, founder and chief creative officer of design agency Mad*Pow, shared six ways to identify passionate candidates who you'll want to add to your team.

Pay attention to hobbies and interests.

Assess the ability to maintain a work-life balance.

Evaluate professional-growth goals.

Measure their capacity for generosity.

Test their mettle.

Gauge what thrills them.

The article is worth reading.

Of course, learning about a person’s passion isn’t easy. Forbes suggests 3 ways to discover your passion, which may be a start as you analyze this in employees. .